A Values-Focused Approach to Science-Informed Decision-Making for Arctic Communities

The rapid pace of socio-ecological change in the Arctic underscores the value of long-term data sets for understanding the context of scientific observations, for forecasting future conditions, and making informed decisions on how to adapt to these large-scale challenges. However, data and models that provide status and trend information are only as useful as the human-mediated processes that utilize these information products for decision-making. This poster provides an overview of how Structured Decision Making (SDM) can be used to support science-informed decision-making. SDM has been successfully employed in various contexts to empower stakeholders with tools to help them make informed, defensible, and transparent choices for complex environmental challenges at the nexus of environmental, social, and economic needs. We present a framework for capturing these needs in a web-accessible, collaborative tool so that arctic communities can collaborate on shared challenges. SDM provides a framework for explicitly linking stakeholder values to data, and models to help guide decisions that are transparent, reproducible and technically defensible. SDM also allows for probabilistic consequence modeling that can be used for forward and backward reasoning, sensitivity analyses, and value of information analyses used to address sources of uncertainty.